Teaching Frankenstein and Race

This article considers how we might teach the discourse of 'race' in Mary Shelley's novel. I open by surveying how the language of race that threads through Frankenstein has been treated in the novel's critical and popular history, from the earliest reviewers who saw in the Creature a version of Shakespeare's Caliban, to the banning of the text in apartheid-era South Africa, and at last to twenty-first-century critical accounts. In the critical history, one pattern that emerges in treatments of Frankenstein and race is a tendency to attempt to stabilize the precise nature of the Creature's alterity by pointing to one specific contemporary discourse or another. While this approach has generated much thoughtful and provocative work over the past two decades and more, I consider how we might help students to engage the historical contexts of Shelley's novel without leading them rush to name a hermeneutic key. I suggest that an overdetermined political allegory like Frankenstein requires us to avoid moving too assuredly either from figure to context or, in the other direction, from ambiguity to indeterminacy: there is a difficult middle ground in between these two interpretive routes that is worth inhabiting in order to guide students more fully to understand just how richly Shelley's novel engages both Romantic-era and long-historical discourses of race.